Britain may need to send more troops to Afghanistan despite the success of Operation Panther’s Claw, military chiefs admit. Brigadier Tim Radford, commander of Task Force Helmand, said that the existing troops could not be expected to mount further significant operations without reinforcements.
The scale of the challenge was revealed yesterday as it emerged that British soldiers have faced nearly 1,000 roadside bombs in the past three months. Although 3,000 troops managed to drive out about 500 Taleban during the five-week offensive, they will be fully deployed holding an area in Helmand province about the size of the Isle of Wight, their commanding officer admitted.
The warning came as the Ministry of Defence prepared today to launch a legal action against two former soldiers to reduce compensation payments for injuries. Light Dragoon Anthony Duncan, who walks with crutches after being shot while on patrol in Iraq, was originally awarded £9,250, which was increased to £46,000 by an appeal tribunal. Royal Marine Matthew McWilliams fractured his thigh in a military exercise and was awarded £8,250, increased to £28,750 on appeal.
The High Court upheld the higher awards, ruling that the MoD’s argument that there should be a distinction between the original injury and later complications was absurd. Now, however, the MoD is taking the case to the Court of Appeal, where lawyers are expected to claim the pair should be compensated only for the initial injuries and not subsequent health problems.
Lieutenant Colonel Jerome Church, of the British Limbless Ex-Servicemen’s Association, described the court case as “very unfortunate” at a time when British soldiers were sustaining more deaths and injuries than at any time since the 2001 invasion. “This case is obviously appalling timing for the Ministry of Defence. This has been in the wings for some time,” Colonel Church said.
Simon Weston OBE, a former Welsh Guardsman who suffered serious burns during the Falklands War, branded the court bid “car-crash politics”. He said: “The system is incredibly flawed. If you get shot in the leg, and you get a subsequent infection which causes you to lose the leg, do you lose compensation for the loss of the leg or do you only get it for the gunshot which would probably be only a few thousand pounds?”
The MoD announced yesterday that two more soldiers had been killed in Afghanistan. Brigadier Radford said that although 23 soldiers had died since the operation began on June 19, only 10 were a direct result of the offensive in central Helmand.
The bodies of four of the dead will return to British soil today. Rifleman Aminiasi Toge, 26, Corporal Joseph Etchells, 22, Captain Daniel Shepherd, 28 and Guardsman Christopher King, 20, will be repatriated at RAF Lyneham, in Wiltshire, shortly after 11am.
As has become tradition, coffins carrying their bodies will pass through the nearby town of Wootton Bassett, pausing at the war memorial, before heading on to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford where post-mortem examinations will be carried out. Hundreds of British Legion veterans, shopkeepers and residents are expected to line the streets to pay their respects as the cortege passes through.
The four died in separate incidents in Helmand province, most involving roadside bombs. Details emerged yesterday of the “industrial” scale of the Taleban’s production of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Brigadier Radford, speaking by video link from his headquarters at Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand, said that troops had encountered 153 IEDs encountered during Panther’s Claw – and 994 since April. The release of details of Panther’s Claw gave Gordon Brown an opportunity to wrest back the political initiative over Afghanistan after the controversy over troop levels and helicopters.
Yesterday he hailed the offensive as an “heroic” military success, saying it had made Britain safer and pushed back the Taleban. David Miliband stole some of Mr Brown’s thunder, however, taking Downing Street by surprise with a call for renewed efforts to engage the Taleban politically. The Foreign Secretary used a speech to Nato leaders in Brussels to deliver an uncompromising message aimed at President Karzai of Afghanistan, calling for a programme of “reintegration and reconciliation” for moderate Taleban.
He rejected talks with insurgents who were fighting British troops in Helmand, telling Channel 4 News: “If they [the Taleban] carry on trying to kill British troops, then of course we can’t reconcile them into the system, because they will be making a choice of violence.”
The two deaths announced yesterday take the total losses to 191 since 2001. Neither was linked to Panther’s Claw. A soldier from The Light Dragoons was killed by an explosion while he was on a vehicle patrol in Lashkar Gah. A soldier from the 5th Regiment Royal Artillery was killed by an explosion during a foot patrol in Sangin, in northern Helmand.